The field of the invention relates generally to calculating and tracking nutritional information of food consumed by a consumer, and, more specifically, to network-based systems and methods for calculating and tracking nutritional information for food purchased by the consumer.
Consumers are increasingly health conscious. For example, consumers want to know how their food intake affects their health and fitness goals, and thus, in many cases, they are particularly interested in the nutritional value of the food they consume. In addition, consumers are using a variety of devices and services to track and improve their activity levels. For example, some consumers use “fitness wearables” that use accelerometers, GPS tracking, and other technology to track the physical activity of the user of the wearable. Such wearables make it simple and convenient for users to track their exercise and other physical activity.
Other consumers may use various “diary”-style services or programs, in which the user manually logs their physical activity by activity type and duration of the activity. Such diary-style services may be time consuming, and they require the user either to remember all of their activity performed over the course of a day, or to constantly update their activity log throughout the day, which can be tedious and/or inconvenient for many users. Unfortunately, these known systems also require the user to manually track their food consumption. In these known systems, the user must enter each and every food item they consume in a particular meal or particular day, including the amount of each food consumed, which can be a difficult task to complete accurately. As a result, many users over- or underestimate their consumption, and many users get tired of the tedious task of entering food into their “food diary,” which may lead the user to abandon the task entirely. This issue may be particularly relevant to users when they eat out at restaurants, where it may be difficult to know, let alone track, the ingredients and amounts of those ingredients that go into a meal. Even when nutritional information about a meal purchased at a restaurant is available, for example posted on a web site of the restaurant, a patron must still remember to manually enter the information into the “diary”-style service or program and expend time and effort in doing so.
Accordingly, it is desired to have a system that will automatically calculate the caloric intake and other nutritional values of a consumer including when the consumer is eating at a restaurant.